Inside Health

Ian Pretyman Stevenson, 88; Studied Claims of Past Lives

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: February 18, 2007

Ian Stevenson, an academic psychiatrist who 45 years ago abandoned Freud as too unscientific and turned to the paranormal as a tool with which to plumb the human psyche, died on Feb. 8 in Charlottesville, Va. He was 88 and had lived in Charlottesville for many years.

The cause was pneumonia, his brother, Dr. Kerr White, said.

Until his retirement in 2002, Dr. Stevenson was the head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia; he had founded the division in 1967. Formerly called the Division of Personality Studies, it is part of the university's department of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences. Among the phenomena that the division investigates, according to its Web site, are children who claim to remember previous lives, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, apparitions and after-death communications, and deathbed visions.

With the planned closing later this month of the Princeton University laboratory devoted to studying telekinesis and extrasensory perception, the University of Virginia center remains one of the few academic facilities of its kind in the country.

Dr. Stevenson was internationally famous for his research into what he sometimes called ''survival of personality after death,'' popularly referred to as reincarnation. In his view, reincarnation, along with heredity and environment, offered a possible explanation for a range of personality traits, including phobias, unusual abilities and gender dysphoria. For decades, he traveled the world, recording cases of children who claimed to recall lives as other people in other places, stories he then sought to verify.

Logging tens of thousands of miles each year, Dr. Stevenson recorded more than 2,500 cases, which he published in a series of technical books. Among them are ''Cases of the Reincarnation Type'' (University Press of Virginia, 1975-1983); ''Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation'' (University Press of Virginia, 1987); and his major work, ''Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects'' (Praeger, 1997), at 2,268 pages.

Dr. Stevenson was the subject of a nonfiction book, ''Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives'' (Simon & Schuster, 1999), by Tom Shroder, a journalist at The Washington Post.

In one case, as Dr. Stevenson recounted it, a newborn girl in Sri Lanka screamed whenever she was carried near a bus or a bath. When she was old enough to talk, he said, she recounted a previous life as a girl of 8 or 9 who drowned after a bus knocked her into a flooded rice paddy; later investigation found the family of just such a dead girl living four or five kilometers away. The two families, Dr. Stevenson said, were believed to have had no contact.

Spurned by most academic scientists, Dr. Stevenson was to his supporters a misunderstood genius, bravely pushing the boundaries of science. To his detractors, he was earnest, dogged but ultimately misguided, led astray by gullibility, wishful thinking and a tendency to see science where others saw superstition.

''I think he was trying to figure things out, but he just didn't follow elementary proper standards,'' said Leonard Angel, a philosopher of religion at Douglas College in New Westminster, British Columbia, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. ''but you do have to look carefully to see it; that's why he's been very persuasive to many people.''

Professor Angel has reviewed Dr. Stevenson's work for publications, among them the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, that promote rational explanation of claims of the paranormal.

For his part, Dr. Stevenson emphasized that the information he collected was meant only to suggest that reincarnation was possible, not to prove it beyond doubt.

''Some of it's terribly fascinating,'' he told The Washington Post in 1978. ''One child in India claims to have once lived in Kansas. And of course there is the rubbish. We dismiss any cases of Venusian fantasies.''

Ian Pretyman Stevenson was born on Oct. 31, 1918, in Montreal and reared in Ottawa. His father, a journalist born in Scotland, was the Canadian correspondent for The Times of London. His mother had a keen interest in theosophy, the system of semireligious mystical beliefs popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dr. Stevenson would credit her vast library of books on the subject with creating his interest in spiritual phenomena.

Dr. Stevenson earned a bachelor of science degree from McGill University in 1942 and a medical degree there the next year. After psychiatric training, he taught at Louisiana State University, and in 1957, at 38, he became chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia.

But over the next few years, Dr. Stevenson came to feel that there were aspects of human personality that neither Freudian nor behavioral theories could account for. In 1961, inspired partly by a trip to India, he began to study reincarnation.

Dr. Stevenson's first wife, Octavia Reynolds, whom he married in 1947, died in 1983. He is survived by his second wife, Margaret Pertzoff, whom he married in 1985. Also surviving are a sister, Edith Meisner, of Knowlton, Quebec; and his brother, Dr. White, of Charlottesville.

Asked repeatedly whether he believed in reincarnation, Dr. Stevenson was publicly circumspect. But tucked away in a file cabinet in the Division of Perceptual Studies is an ordinary combination lock, which Dr. Stevenson bought and locked nearly 40 years ago. He had set the combination himself.

As a colleague in the division, Emily Williams Kelly, explained in a telephone interview on Wednesday, Dr. Stevenson based the combination on a secret mnemonic device -- a particular word or a sentence, perhaps -- known only to him.

''He did say, that if he found himself able, he would try to communicate that,'' Ms. Kelly said. ''Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated -- I don't quite know how it would work -- if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested.''